The rebooted "Fantastic Four" is one of the worst rated superhero movies of all time, and now its director Josh Trank, producers, and the Fox studio are pinning the blame on each other.
The brouhaha began when Tranks posted a frustrated tweet saying that he had "a fantastic version" of the film which unfortunately audiences would "probably never see."
Then he sent an e-mail to the film's cast and crew members several days before "Fantastic Four" opened in cinemas, telling them that he was proud of the film, which he wrote, was "better than 99 percent of the comic-book movies ever made."
But not everybody seems to agree. "I don't think so," one cast member told The Hollywood Reporter.
Trank promptly deleted his angry tweet, but that was enough to enrage 20th Century Fox, and now several media outlets are concocting their own theories as to what really happened behind the scenes and why the "Fantastic Four" movie was not as cohesive as they would have hoped.
Several sources said that the director failed in producing material that would have rescued the film from dire straits, and he even refused help from anybody who wanted to give some input.
"He holed up in a tent and cut himself off from everybody," one high-level source shared. "He built a black tent around his monitor. He was extremely withdrawn."
In between set-ups, the source said that Trank "would go to his trailer and he wouldn't interact with anybody."
Fox really wanted a "grounded, gritty version of Fantastic Four that was almost the opposite of previous versions" and they initially thought that Trank could deliver this vision. They even stood by his side as he insisted on a gloomy tone for the characters portrayed by Miles Teller, Michael B. Jordan, Kate Mara, and Jamie Bell.
"During takes, he would be telling cast members when to blink and when to breathe," one person said. "He kept pushing them to make the performance as flat as possible."
Trank was mostly to blame for the movie's disappointing reviews, but Fox is partly to blame too, said the source. The movie was "ill-conceived, made for the wrong reasons and there was no vision behind the property," this person revealed. "Say what you will about Marvel but they have a vision."
Even before cameras started rolling, Fox thought of firing Trank but did not push through with it, since the studio was trying to get rid of its reputation for micromanaging filmmakers.
